Tangled Webs - One- Shot
Title: Tangled Webs
Author: luvspnl
Characters/Pairings: Dean, Lisa, John, others mentioned
Scenario: After There Comes a Time
Summary: Dean’s not too thrilled with Lisa's deception.
Author's Notes/Warnings: Language
Disclaimer: As with everything, I can't take all claim for the brilliance and must attribute Kripke.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive!
-Sir Walter Scott, Marmion
To say that, come morning, everything was as it should be, was so vastly understated.
Dean was pissed.
Most specifically, Dean was pissed at Lisa.
Lisa Braeden, mother to his now eight year old son, Benny, had just hosted Ben's birthday party the previous night. Dean had manned the grill, making hot dogs and cheeseburgers for a whole class of second graders and their parents. Dean had been having a great time. He had spent the previous two days helping move furniture around, get the decorations, decorate the house and the backyard, had even managed to set up the inflatable bounce house without too much help. It had been fun.
And then, his long lost brothers (and their current lives) had shown up.
It had taken Dean completely by surprise, but it didn't take him long to figure out that Lisa was the responsible party.
He couldn't believe it. Not that he was seeing his brothers again, or that Lisa would go behind his back and do something to him like that.
Dean knew that Lisa thought that their not having any contact with his older brother, Nick, for eight years, and his younger brother, Sam, for four years, was kind of ridiculous. And if they had been any other family, the fact that Nick wanted to get married and Sammy wanted to go to college wouldn't have been such a big deal. Heck, they would have probably been good news.
But they were Winchesters.
To be a Winchester meant that you didn't get to have a happy ending kind of life. Dean had realized that, at the age of four, when he had seen his childhood home burn. His mother had never made it out, and with her had died his innocence and any hope he, or his brothers, had to be normal. Apparently, his brothers hadn't gotten that memo, because they still thought that they could have that happy life.
Lisa wasn't a Winchester. She didn't know the kind of crap luck that followed his family around. Dean had never intended in having a child, but now he had two, and he wasn't going to let the family curse get to his kids. Lisa was Benny's chance at normal. If Dean popped into his life every now and again, it was so that the kid didn't feel like he was abandoned by his father growing up.
As Dean awoke the morning after Benny's party, thankfully a Friday, Dean was a bit surprised that he was still pissed. It wasn't that he was now happy about what Lisa had done, he wasn't, but it was rare for him to hold a grudge.
Dean held his little blanket hog, aka Dylan Winchester, tighter in his arms. Down the hall, he knew his youngest brother, Matthew, was sleeping in the newly eight year old Ben's room and he could hear Adam softly snoring in the sofa bed at the other end of the room. His father would be downstairs, having slept on the couch, and likely already up and making coffee and Lisa would be in her room down the hall.
Everything was as it should be, but it wasn't.
Dean didn't feel content, like he would usually at the thought that his whole family was under one roof. It had been years since he had had to stop and think about Nick and Sam, about whether or not to include them into his sentiment.
In reality, his entire family was in the same city. Adam had mentioned that Nick, Sam and their travel companions would be staying at the hotel. Cicero was one of the few places that Dean didn't have to stay at a motel/hotel, so he rarely paid any attention to where they might be. But the fact of the matter was, Nick and Sam Winchester, his brothers, were within driving - heck walking - distance.
Dean was glad that they were okay, really, but Lisa had betrayed him. He hadn't felt so, so used since Sam left for Stanford.
Picking Dylan up, Dean got up and transferred the littlest Winchester over to the sofa-bed, with Adam. Adam blinked his eyes opened for a second, spotted Dean and slung an arm around Dylan before going back to sleep. Smiling, Dean pulled the blankets back around the two and left them to sleep.
Downstairs, Dean wasn't surprised to see his father up and about, but he was surprised to see a sleepless Lisa Braeden sitting at her kitchen table.
"Morning," Dean groaned to no one in particular as he headed over to the coffee.
John Winchester was standing, leaning up against the pantry door. Dean cringed at the look on his father's face. The man did not look pleased, but he wasn't quite at pissed yet.
"Morning," John replied, glancing at his son and then back to Lisa.
Dean followed his father's gaze, turning now, coffee hot in his hands, to take a better look at the woman he was currently perplexed over.
Not only did she look like she hadn't had a wink of sleep all night, she looked as if she had recently been upset, crying maybe, or at least close to it.
"Dean," she greeted barely getting her eyes off of the counter in front of her to meet his eyes.
Dean glanced back at his father. He wondered what had transpired between the two.
"Everything alright?" he asked, seeing as how no one seemed to be talking. He didn't even think about how he was currently feeling, just wondered about the rare tension between his father and his son's mother.
"We were just discussing the unexpected turnabout of Ben's party." John said. His voice was tight, and it made Dean frown. He had thought that his father was happy about the outcome. The man had certainly seemed happy enough, talking and even hugging his sons, meeting his grandkids last night as Dean glanced through the window, torn between running back downstairs and joining in and running downstairs to shot someone.
Dean wondered what it was that his father had found out to make him so hostile towards Lisa.
"No kidding," Dean said, gripping at his mug and forcing a sip before he started in on a conversation that he hadn't mentally prepared for yet. He wanted to confront Lisa, get her to tell him why she felt the need to drag his brothers out there, not inform any of them, and how she had done it. Apparently, his father had already given her the runaround, but that wasn't nearly as satisfying as it usually was when his father gave someone a piece of his mind.
"Apparently," John said, getting off of the door and straightening up. His pose was anything but casual. "I have a call to make, but I'm sure Lisa will fill you in on that."
Dean watched his father leave and turned his full attention to Lisa. He was now more curious than pissed. John treated Lisa with more respect than Dean even thought about dishing out, so seeing them at ends certainly brought the situation to another level. Dean didn't doubt that John felt betrayed; trust was something that Winchesters valued highly. You had to trust someone to know what they were doing to watch your back. Lisa had side-stepped the usual scrutiny that it took for someone to be brought into the 'inner circle' and consider themselves family. She was Ben's mother, and Ben was Dean's son, so she was accepted for her contribution to the family, or something, and maybe they had to rethink that.
Sure, Lisa had just contacted Sam and Nick, but the younger Winchesters were the closest guarded secret. Some people didn't even know that Dad had kids, let alone grandkids, and if they did meet Dean and John together, they could easily pass off as Hunting partners. It wasn't a lie, but it protected the complete truth and that was the most important thing to John Winchester. If he couldn't protect his own children, how could he even think about going out there and protecting everyone else?
He had a few more sips of coffee, each less forced then the previous. He wasn’t mad at the coffee, how could he be when it was nice and hot and tasted just right.
“Look,” Lisa said, her voice barely above a whisper. “I get that you’re mad about having-
“I’m not mad about seeing my brothers,” Dean said, placing his coffee mug on the counter. He leaned back and tried not to glare as he spoke. “What I’m pissed about is the fact that you thought you had any right to go behind our backs and do something like that!”
“Like what? Invite my son’s uncles to his birthday party?” Lisa snapped back.
“Invite my brothers where they weren’t wanted!” he shouted back, his hands gripping in fist at his sides.
“Well, I wanted them here.”
“How the hell could you want them here, or anywhere? You don’t know shit about them!”
“Yeah!” Lisa stood, leaning forward on the island between them. “And whose fault is that?”
Dean scoffed.
“Spare me-
“Whose fault,” she interrupted. “Is it that Ben doesn’t know his uncles?”
“Benny knows his uncles,” Dean stressed, the words bitter as they left him.
“Whose fault,” she started again. “Is it that he doesn’t know his own cousins? I didn’t even know he had any, Dean!”
“What does that have to do with you sneaking around and calling them here?” Dean asked, shaking his head.
“I thought family was the most important thing to you,” Lisa said, sitting back down. She crossed her arms, getting her hands beneath the warmth of her robe.
Dean glared, shaking his head. “That’s not fair.”
“My mother was here about a month ago.”
Dean groaned and leaned heavily against the counter. “Of course! I knew she had to have something to do with this.”
Lisa glared back. “She was talking to Ben, asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. Talked about, I don’t know, sports, and girlfriends, and college.”
Dean didn’t know where Lisa was going with this, but he knew he wasn’t going to like it. Not only did Lisa’s mother have it out for him, but every time she visited her daughter, Lisa and him ended up in some kind of argument or another. He wasn’t interested enough in his son’s life, he didn’t take more initiative in his school, he kept letting Bennie get hurt, he wasn’t monitoring what the boy was watching. And on and on.
“I don’t see what this has to do with anything, Lisa.”
“Of course you don’t,” she muttered. “Ben said, he couldn’t go to college.” Dean opened him mouth, but this time Lisa didn’t let him interrupt. “He said that his daddy and gramps would hate him if he went.”
“What?” Dean certainly hadn’t expected that.
“Ben said that you and John would hate him if he went to college,” Lisa said, her voice edging with anger and maybe some disbelief.
“Why would he say-
“Maybe because the last time someone went to college, in your family, he was kicked out!” Lisa yelled back.
“Hey!” Dean pushed off the counter and was leaning hard against the island in a second. “You shut up about what you don’t know! We didn’t kick Sam out of our lives, he wanted to leave!”
“For college!” Lisa shook her head in disbelief. “College, Dean. Not to join some cult, or the circus, or whatever other horrible thing he could have done. He didn’t run off and become a polygamist, or a serial killer, or anything! He went to college! Like so many other kids his age do, every single year!”
“Don’t talk like you understand! It’s not the same thing. He turned his back on his family, he didn’t want anything to do with us anymore.”
“And Nick?” Lisa countered. “Did he not want anything to do with his family anymore too, or was that your father being stubborn, too.”
“What Nick did was stupid!” Dean gripped the granite island top and tried to remain calm. He didn’t talk about his brothers. Anyone who knew about the two missing Winchesters, knew enough to never bring them up.
And then there was Lisa Braeden. Lisa, who knew enough about the life to have the salt lines put down and protective sigils carved into the doorways and windows. Knew enough that she didn’t ask them about the new injuries they acquired between visits. Knew enough that if something happened, she could get out of there and to Caleb and Mera in Lincoln, or Bobby in South Dakota.
She still didn’t know when to keep her mouth shut.
“For falling in love and wanting to start a family? Yeah, he was a real moron!”
“For bringing someone into this life, into the family when -
“And what’s so bad, so horrible about you all that even the thought of someone getting a little close becomes such a catastrophe?”
Dean looked away from her, glaring instead to the wall, the fridge, anything but her.
“We’re cursed, Lisa.”
“Yeah, you’ve said that before. But you know what, you Winchesters aren’t cursed. You’re stubborn, egocentric men, set upon some impossible mission to rid the world of evil and avenge your mother’s death.”
“That impossible mission,” Dean fired back. “Saved your son’s life.”
Lisa sighed and leaned heavily back into her seat. She reached up and passed her hands through her disheveled hair.
“I know that, Dean.”
“No, you don’t. You don’t get that this mission, this is what we have to do. It doesn’t matter so much what we want anymore. We know what’s out there, how to stop it, how to save people, and we do it. We all did. But Nick, Sam? That wasn’t good enough for them anymore. Not our family, not finding mom’s killer, not even all of the innocents that get caught up in this dark world, killed because they lived these apple pie, normal lives and had no damn clue how to save themselves when the time came.” Dean took the rest of his cup of coffee and went to the sink, dumping the lukewarm drink down the drain. “You ever think what would happen if it was different? If Dad and I, if all the others, weren’t out there, with our impossible missions?”
Dean turned around and saw that same tearful look on Lisa’s face that he had noticed when he first arrived in the kitchen.
“Because I do. All the time.” Dean started to walk out of the kitchen, but after a few steps stopped. He spoke again, but he looked straight ahead, where he could see the edge of the bottom of the stairwell. The stairs that led to some of the most important people in his life. “We wouldn’t be celebrating Ben’s eighth birthday, that’s for sure.”
In the end, he didn’t ask Lisa how she knew. If John knew, Dean would find out later. Whoever had told her, though, would certainly be getting an earful now. He could understand wanting to know more about Nick and Sammy. Heck, as much as he wanted to pretend otherwise, Dean couldn’t forget his brothers. He’d looked up to Nick for so long, but when the older boy had left, it had shocked him and the very idea of giving up the Hunt, leaving the family, it made Dean ill just to phantom. He had thought his little brother felt the same. Up until he saw Sam drag himself out of their rundown, Alabama house and never look back.
Dean couldn’t stop thinking about his brothers, because that’s what he did. He cared for his family. All of them.
It had taken him too long to realize, however, that they didn’t always care back.
END.